The Amp Hour

By The Amp Hour (Chris Gammell and David L Jones)

The Amp Hour is a weekly conversation about electronics and the people who design them.... more

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How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

The Amp Hour episodes:

July 02, 2014Solar Factories and HVDC Lines - Pollent Power Pushing
Chris says that there is still lots of time to enter The Hackaday Prize. Don't Panic.
Dave recently did a judge interview.
Need to connect your project? Chris got his Electric Imp working in about 10 minutes using their getting started guide.
Dave recently had to declare email bankruptcy. Chris was listening to a podcast about someone who had to do the same with nearly 10,000 unread emails.
Sometimes we get used to the reminders we set for ourselves. Chris either needs a speaker in his house that announces meetings or a shock collar that punishes for not getting something done.
Dave recently made a video debunking the solar roadways we discussed a few weeks back.
Elon Musk (via SolarCity) recently bought a solar manufacturing company. They will be opening a new plant in Western New York near Chris's hometown.
They will also use the abundant power from Niagara Falls to help power the plant. Chris took pictures with a Nikola Tesla statue up there when he was younger.
Germany now gets 50% of its power from renewable sources.
Martin Lorton is installing solar panels on his house in Cleveland. Even with cloudy cities like Cleveland (and some in Germany), they can still output significant power.
Dave says there are now 1 million homes with solar in Australia.
Chris reveals that he used to design instrumentation at ABB.
The exciting stuff coming from ABB in the past few years have been around HVDC, specifically with an eye towards long distance transmission of massive amounts of power (think gigawatts).
Another exciting piece is the DC Breaker that can switch the large amounts of power in less than 20 ms.
They also look amazing, the standoffs required for 800kV is significant.
The Diagrammer by Mergenthaler was a badass piece of industrial equipment for making schematics. Think there are any still around?
Rhode & Schwarz stopped branding products in the Hameg product line as Hameg (with the associated logo).
Someone made a compilation video of Dave saying America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D8bdemvjIk
Our buddy Mike Ossmann has been working on the NSA playset, a replication of the hardware shown in the catalog of gadgets to order. He will be showing it off DefCon.
Chris will also be traveling to Detroit in two weekends to hang out with the Hackaday guys and film the Red Bull Create competition.
Dave has been duking it out in the harsh Aussie winter by competing in the Tough Bloke competition.
Image is courtesy of ABB
...more
1h 18min
June 25, 2014An Interview with Noah Feehan - Biloquistic Blinking Blush
Welcome, Noah Feehan (@AKAMediaSystem)!
Noah is one of the hardware (and more!) engineers in the New York Times R&D Lab. Their charter is to look 3-5 years out, especially how media will change.
He found out about the group from a post on PSFK, an aggregator blog similar to Kottke.org.
Prior to the New York Times, he did his master's at the MIT media lab.
The New York Times Idea Lab is separate, they work more on the future of display on the web.
One of Noah's latest projects (which he talked about at Solid) was Blush, a wearable that listens to conversations and lights up when it hears common topics between those talking.
It interfaces with Curriculum, a Chrome browser plugin that captures and infers high level topics of interest. Privacy is maintained for the pages it scrapes by anonymizing data.
The device is built upon the RFduino, tiny cortex with a built in bluetooth module.
The Blush is a single bit output. In the future, the "Clip-E" project will have a small display.
They want to be informative without being overbearing and interrupting the conversation.
More Monty Python conversation card
Than the PeeWee Herman secret word
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxMZgeBlqzQ
Kate Hartmen of the Social Body Lab in Toronto works on Nudgeables, 1 bit haptic interactions.
Noah has experimented with this as well, mapping and applying heat via heating pads from adafruit.
REVEL is a haptic interaction designed by Disney, it changes as you move your finger over it.
The NYT R&D lab has a nice setup of equipment, Noah is excited to get the ex1 to start printing flexible electronics.
Noah really wants to build a time lapse moveable setup. This reminded Chris of a Tech Shop video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88vTsKdysoo&t=14m00s
Chris got started with the guerilla guide to CNC machining.
The members of the R&D lab try to give back to open source communities, as many of them came from them.
While working in the hyper instruments group at the MIT Media Lab, Noah was introduced and consulted for Bjork on her Biophillia album.
A favorite (weird) video of ours: Bjork explains a TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75WFTHpOw8Y
Collaborating on projects can be really hard with hardware, Noah was impressed by the work that Mathieu Stephan (limpkin) has done for the Mooltipass as part of Hackaday.
Another project that Noah has worked on recently is the GridEye, a tiny 8x8 pixel thermal camera. It uses a a $40, export controlled sensor from Panasonic.
Noah really wants to see more of the spectrum...like a Mantis Shrimp!
Another interaction piece, Noah installed the "Fixture" project in his wife's office. It tracks the orientation of his smartphone throughout the day and displays it on the wall. This reminded Chris of the Weasley family clock in Harry Potter.
Many thanks to Noah for stopping by and telling us about his projects! It's always interesting hearing from people who bridge the gap between art and science and who are pushing the boundaries of how we communicate and consume information.
...more
1h 7min
June 18, 2014Tesla, Checklists and Bullies - Emerging External Eupsychics
Contextual Electronics (Session 1B) is complete
Tesla is going to open its patents
Chris has been installing a Discourse forum
Nanodegrees: A New Kind Of Credential For Jobs in Technology (Udacity)
Freetronics Led DMD MQTT message client
Zukin bully former employee into removing a free PCB routing program he wrote
An interview with Jack Ganssle
WEBENCH can now export layouts to various CAD tools
Ceramic Capacitor Voltage Dependency
Dave fixed a TV (for his mum)
Schematic Style Guide
Checklists are important
Thanks to carspottingmex for the picture of the Tesla
...more
1h
June 11, 2014An Interview With Brandon Harris - Impish Internet Iamatology
Welcome Brandon Harris of Electric Imp!
Hugo started the company after leaving Apple (after briefly working at Nest). He worked on an Apple stock notifier (that turns green or red depending on stock direction). The frustration around connecting XML and JSON lead to the Imp.
Brandon and Hugo worked together at Apple on the iPhone.
Around the Electric Imp offices, one of the employees made the "IoTEA", a notification system for when the kettle is ready.
Electric Imp wants to be the AWS of IoT.
There are currently three different versions of Imp hardware:
IMP001 is the SD card.
IMP002 is the solder down device.
IMP003 is the lower cost, no antenna module manufactured by Murata.
Each of these has the Broadcom wifi chipset, the same used in iPhones.
The main processor is the STM32 Cortex M3.
The coding language for the Electric Imp is Squirrel. They started with Lua, both of which are scripting languages.
The application team created a freefall detection device, something you throw in the air and it connects to the internet and sends a packet before returning to your hands.
DHCP is the slowest step in the connection process.
The Imp runs eCos, they call it impOS.
Using the SD card you are limited to 6 pins, it can help to use an i2c expander. Bit banging has to go through the SPI port.
Because it is an RTOS instead of a superloop, it can be a tough adjustment for normal Arduino users.
The Nora reference design is a multi sensor design with qualification of the power. Quirky has a similar product called Spotter.
There are a wide variety of other reference designs to pull from.
The sleep modes sip current in different modes:
Deep sleep: 4-6 uA wakes on timer or interrupt
On with wifi off: 1-2 mA
On with wifi on: 5-6 mA
Everything on: 100 mA
Nora reference design has battery info/comparison. It gets roughly 60K wakes on 2 AA alkalines. Nora does 15 mins between uploads, 1 min wake for each read.
Wifi is TDMA.
BlinkUP is how you get the info into a device, it uses a phototransistor on the bottom of the SD card (or you have to add one)
Adam Wolf told us about how they do something similar at Wayne and Layne.
Brandon hopes future products will try bluetooth, cellular.
They tried to put their reference designs into the public domain, which wasn't allowed. Instead they licensed with the X11 open source license.
All of the necessary code and drivers for the Electric Imp are on their Git Hub repo.
Their main competition is SparkCore; the differentiating factor is that Spark allows you to run on their servers, whereas Electric Imp helps to make the process smoother.
...more
1h 37min
June 04, 2014Cheap Respins And A Time Machine - Multiscience Mercenary Marketplace
Dave wrote a post about the economics of hardware.
Chris now is part of the Google Helpout program. You can rent time with him.
A previous program Chris was part of was Maven. He didn't like that it was just surveys.
A version with actual engineering tasks is Proto Exchange, which is specifically for electrical engineers. CircuitHub is also setting up a marketplace for electronic work as more people want to get into hardware.
The Embedded podcast recently had a show about hiring.
Contextual Electronics had some (unintential) issues during the build, including a wrong footprint and a couple of reversed signals.
Dave's advice for a checklist? Double check everything.
Two things you need to get a great product
Cheap respins
A time machine
eFabless is a new service for sharing a wafer and getting low cost custom chips. The low cost is the result of excess capacity.
It uses an online compiler called Yosys, the author of which was on our subreddit.
We assumed it was all digital as it is defined with verilog, but it might do mixed signal.
Others deal with excess capacity by converting the fabs to grow lettuce.
The ISEE3 satellite has been reclaimed!
Elon Musk has been driving amazing companies, such as SpaceX. The recently announced Dragon V2 looks amazing. It reminds Dave of the ship in the film version of Contact.
NASA is apparently planning to send people to Mars by 2035.
Dave is reminded of the 40 day report.
Watson (the computer that won Jeopardy!) will now be doing medical diagnosis.
Google announced a self driving car that they are planning on manufacturing.
Mentioned last week, manufacturing is moving from China to Mexico due to cost, logistics, agreements.
Thanks to ChaoticGood01 for the Lego picture
...more
1h 17min
May 28, 2014SolidCon and Traveling Tech - Joined Junk Jocularity
Chris is back in his lab after a week and a half of travel; Dave continues to trick out his lab to take advantage of his high speed internet.
Chris has road-tested the portalab! There isn't enough lighting, nor time in the day to work on it.
My hotel room based electronics lab pic.twitter.com/f3AXExoZIB
— Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) May 20, 2014
Does solder have an expiration date?
Dave is going lead-free in his lab.
Flux pens can be nice, but pricey. No clean flux isn't worth it.
In the late 80s, there was a push to use citrus cleaning solvents for boards (PDF).
The TSA also went through Chris's Portalab case. They were met with this note:
Packing the portalab for the journey home. This is my note to the TSA, should they decided to mess with my stuff. pic.twitter.com/cltEIXmUeC
— Chris Gammell (@Chris_Gammell) May 24, 2014
Chris was still in San Francisco for SolidCon (you can see the schedule here). It's meant to be a conference for the crossover of hardware and software.
Videos should be online eventually. Dave doesn't understand why people would speak at conferences without someone taping it.
On interesting protocol that Chris learned about was MQTT, a lightweight way for machines to interact. This is what Facebook uses for their notification.
A similar topic was covered by Peter Semmelhack and Stacey Higgenbothom on the Internet of Things Podcast. The new platform (vs protocol like MQTT) is called dweet.io.
The "hard" part of hardware is the manufacturing and distribution side of things. Brady Forrest of PCH Int'l and Highway1 gave a talk about how there is "No China Button".
During the meetups on non-conference days it was crazy to see how much ferver there is over hardware (and really tech in general). Quirky is opening a new SF office and hiring up to 60 hw engineers.
Outside of SF, Tony Hsieh (the Zappos guy) has invested $10M in US manufacturing (specifically in Las Vegas).
Another investor, Renee DiResta of OATV, gave a presentation about the state of hardware startups and revealed the cost of labor in Mexico are falling past those in China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YICzDD9O1PU
Dave was impressed by the growth of hackerspaces/makerspaces (where do they go when a big city has them?).
Chris's favorite presentation was by Nadya Peek, a PhD candidate in the MIT Center For Bits and Atoms (Neil Gershenfeld's group). The talk focused on modular machines building reconfigurable tools for manufacturing.
If you're interested in the building your own Portalab, there is a lower cost case offered by Digikey.
Mentor and Digikey are pairing up for a low cost CAD tool. At first glance we didn't realize the $300 price tag only gets you schematic capture. Boo.
We ARE excited for the new feature from the CERN folks, working on KiCad. The push and shove router is now released (whatever that means for KiCad)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI
The "Never trust the autorouter" t-shirt is now available for sale on teespring.
Can solar roadways work? There is a crowdfunding project raising money for further research. Chris and Dave agree that feasibility on a large scale road would take a long time to implement.
Another group at SolidCon was the Makani wind turbines/kites.
Chris made a comparison between the derision that smokers receive and people wearing Google Glass. There are a wide range of reactions.
NASA is giving amateurs the chance to recover a long lost satellite out in orbit.
TI is auctioning off the first microchip that Jack Kilby made. It is expected to sell for $1M+.
Chris has been doing field research and hardware people are still cheapskates. Are any of our listeners a counter point?
...more
1h 12min
May 21, 2014The 2014 Maker Faire Show - Traveling Technology Trangam
Laen set up the BringAHack dinner, it was about 120 people! Really well set up.
The Novena funded and as a result, Bunnie cut his hair off!
Jeri gave an update on the CastAR, the molds are just about ready for first shot.
Chris was given an MDO3000 to try out.
Voltset was a company at Maker Faire with a phone/tablet based DMM (the 3rd we've heard of)
Velleman is also coming out with a phone/tablet dual channel scope (with 10 MHz bw)
Chris loved the robotic front loader
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjHJ71SVop4
The portalab is out on the road with Chris. It is all low-cost tools
DMM - The EX330 (reviewed in Dave's $50 shootout)
Oscilloscope - Rigol DS1052E
Soldering iron - Aoyue 937
ATX power supply with BenchBudEE
Hand tools/soldering supplies.
Case - Pelican 1610
Chris finally saw the Othermill in person. It can do 5x5 PCBs from Gerbers or EAGLE files.
More of a machining tool, the Carbide3D Nomad was there as well. It was developed by two hardware folks and the author of the software MeshCAM.
Dave has been working a live stream setup where he can send the HDMI that is captured from his various cameras and microscope.
Ben Heck did a new project that included Dave voice clips. Chris saw it in person.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYo4lOuD_-Y
Chris's "NEVER trust the autorouter" T-shirt was popular but was given away. There will be a teespring campaign for everyone to get one.
Dave had never heard of Uber before, but will try it the next time he travels.
Thanks to @Noazark for the picture of Bunnie's haircut
...more
1h 11min
May 14, 2014Mike Ossmann Returns! - Planetic Portalab Packaging
Welcome again to Mike Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets!
Mike will be attending Hamvention in Dayton OH this year. He'll be at the TAPR booth and giving a talk about the HackRF.
Chris will be at Maker Faire and SolidCon in San Francisco.
Because of travel during Contextual Electronics, Chris has been working on the portalab concept discussed on previous shows (see picture above).
Have you ever participated in a hardware hackathon? Did the winner have the most gear?
Hackaday ran the hackathon at the Freescale Tech Forum in Dallas this year. The entries' subject matter were a testament to the time crunch; the technical piece was well done for many of them.
Mike continues development on the Daisho. It is an open source (HW & SW) USB 3.0 analyzer. It uses a custom core.
The team bought a USB 3.0 analyzer from Lecroy. The chips and the tools still aren't fully mature, so it's not uncommon to find bugs. They have to compare across multiple platforms.
Once again we discussed Rent's Law (same as on the show with Dave Vandenbout); there is a correlation with pin count and logic size. Dave and Mike want the opposite ends of the spectrum.
When asked about putting together an OSHW team, Mike said that he finds people at conferences and due to their contributions to the project before being hired. Many of the main contributors are now paid contractors.
The funding for this project came from the DARPA cyber fast track program.
Bunnie announced that the Novena project will also have a modular oscilloscope add-on possible for the extension header. You can still participate in their crowdfunding campaign!
Mike also recently attended the Colorado OSHWA meeting in Boulder. He got to meet one of the few science savvy US House Reps (Congressman Polis), who also was interested in the trend of open source. The remainder of the US congress still is pretty clueless.
Mike and Chris both use GitHub to capture changes in hardware. Chris is reminded of the XKCD where the commit comments get more and more ridiculous over time.
Image courtesy XKCD.com
You can tag official builds on GitHub with tags (example); Alternately, you can place your finished builds on a separate server, like KiCad.
Dave still isn't sold on KiCad, but we'll wear him down.
If you're at Hamvention, keep an eye on Mike's Twitter feed for a possible meet up.
If you're at Maker Faire, be sure to stop out to the annual #BringAHack dinner, this year at BJ's restaurant in Foster City starting at 6 pm.
...more
1h 20min
May 07, 2014Spacing Out On Space - Dave's Dongle Designing
Dave has decided to keep his current office and update his internet.
A Swedish broadband company showed the effect of crappy internet (because of the lag)
The 3 second lag is similar to a trip for a signal from the earth to the moon.
Speaking of space, Hackaday (and Supply Frame) is sending a design contest winner to space! It's called The Hackaday Prize.
Dave is a judge, Chris is helping to organize it.
There are some parallels to the 555 contest; Dave wants to see an elegant solution, similar to Le Domineux.
On the Virgin Galactic wiki page (a possible carrier for winners of The Hackaday Prize), it mentions that Richard Branson was scheduled to be on Spaceship Two, but apparently Chris was mistaken thinking this had already launched (only testing still).
On the portable lab idea, talked about 2 episodes ago, Chris found a new class of carrying cases: Rolling Makeup Carrying Cases.
If a tablet based scope was going to be included in the portolab, a possible option is the OSCiprime, an open source Android based oscilloscope.
A more rugged and advanced option would be a handheld scope, like the Hantek DSO-1200.
Chris will be at Maker Faire and SolidCon giving talks this year, prompting more discussion about a portable lab. If you'll be in town, let him know!
Altium is moving again, this time to San Diego. Their last move to Shanghai was when Dave was let go.
Dave wrote a forum post translating press release.
EAGLE is also making some changes; their version 7 of their software will be node-locked. This means more hassle for software owners when changing machines (though they will allow two machines to start with)
Dave was once contacted to be a dongle designer. Heh.
The chip world is seeing changes, especially at the top. Intel was not the choice by Google for their new server motherboard. Instead it will be the Power8 chip from IBM.
Amazon is also hiring a chip architect to develop next generation server silicon technology.
Cirrus Logic is buying Woflson, a competing audio firm. Who is left to compete with them for audio amplifiers and CODECs?
One of the hardest things about doing a project (especially alone/with a small team) is handling the purchasing side of things.
Lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System (that many vendors follow), means that there isn't often excess inventory in the marketplace for non-commodity components.
Chris never got his green belt he began training for, but he did develop a distaste for terms like KanBan.
Thanks to Danlockton for the picture of the Dongle Scrapyard
...more
1h 18min
April 30, 2014An Interview with Mike Engelhardt - SPICE Simulator Synteresis
Welcome, LTspice guru, Mike Engelhardt of Linear Technology!
Mike has been writing simulators since 1975! LTspice was his 3rd simulator, it is currently on version 4 and has been in the market for 14 years. You can download it for free here!
Simulators are based upon numerical methods and approximating non-linearities. Mike defines SPICE as having common Jacobian (part of the solving matrix)
The best simulators are not from software companies, they're from the equipment manufacturers. The best measure of radar return from a war plane was from the plane manufacturer.
Mike has optimized LTspice to run fast. This means it uses self authoring code, runs pipeline hot, compiles during the simulation and lots of other stuff Chris didn't understand. This was all in order to remove processing overhead. It also means it's energy efficient!
Berkeley SPICE (the original) had lots of problems and discontinuities for the models contained within. It also was 200000 lines of code, but only 85000 lines of code were actually used. LTspice has closer to 500,000 lines of code.
Intel CPUs are surprising, especially when running multithreaded. Mike recommends benchmarking all systems because of unknown possible behavior.
Making transistor models is a difficult task and not advised for the layman. Either try to talk to the vendor to get one or approximate with a built in model.
THE book on this topic is Semiconductor Device Modeling With Spice, 2nd edition.
Some of the curve parameters are human readable (gate capacitance, beta, etc), others are not.
Power transistor manufacturers do not normally provide models because the work of creating a good power transistor is different than a normal chip designer. To help switcher designs, LT made their own power transistor.
Many of the switchers in LTspice are shown as Macromodel. These are encrypted versions of spice components that are written in a hardware description language.
The LT3780 (which controls 4 switches and can do all types of switching regulation) has a digital engine in SPICE to replicate the state machine on board the chip.
Though Berkeley SPICE is open source, LTspice is not. Mike did not think it was worth losing the competitive advantage.
The control panel in LTspice has lots of knobs you can turn which will mess up your simulation. Some are worth it though:
Solver: normal or alternate
TRTOL: Default is 1 (Windows) or 2 (Mac), but the pros put it on 7 because they can handle possible glitches.
Chris has played with the Gmin characteristic when working on sensitive designs.
The hacks page allows you to turn on or off many of the corner cases that have been designed in over the years.
Mike is currently on a 60 city Arrow seminar tour, on 6 continents! In the past Nu Horizons ran this tour (and Arrow bought them). You can see if Mike is coming to your city and sign up to attend!
Many thanks to Mike for visiting the show! More importantly thanks to him and his team for all the hard work on a tool that many of us use regularly and without hassle or payment! You can reach Mike directly at [email protected] (as always, please be respectful of our guests' time)
...more
1h 33min

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How many episodes does The Amp Hour have?

The podcast currently has 745 episodes available.

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